Displaced to Settled

On a June night in 1949, a young nicely-dressed woman stepped off the train at the quiet station in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. She had been travelling from Ottawa for five days—by First Class, courtesy the government of Canada. She had been told that she would be met by somebody, but no-one turned up. Or, to be more accurate, someone had been there, but, not expecting that the new dentist was a woman, had already left—and would have to be summoned by train staff back to the station.

This was another milestone in the already tumultuous life of 26-year-old Irena Izabele Mikutaviciute. Born in Rokiskis, Lithuania, where she lived until young adulthood, Irena studied dentistry in the Faculty of Medicine in Kaunas. She survived the invasion of her country by both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; fled in 1944 with her dental diploma to not-yet-defeated Germany; and arrived as a refugee in Canada in 1948 where she has lived ever since, almost entirely in British Columbia.

Irena’s family was torn apart by war—she was separated for over a quarter century from her mother, Teofilé, and her brother, Aleksandras. She was fortunate in being educated to practice a manifestly